For indigenous women and children most at risk of violence, there is safety in numbers.

At least that’s the hope of an innovative indigenous-led project to harness the power of big data to first identify, then protect indigenous communities’ most vulnerable members.

Too many indigenous people “have fallen through the cracks of society,” Ontario Regional Chief Isadore Day said at a forum on data analytics last week at Ottawa’s Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health.

“Far too many of our peoples are victims of senseless hate crimes,” Day said. “Far too many go missing and murdered.”

The Indigenous Controlled Technology Forum, which attracted native leaders, senior members of the RCMP, OPP and Ottawa police, along with Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Carolyn Bennett, took place against the sombre backdrop of the first hearings of the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women.

In his speech, Day recalled the still-unsolved killing of Kelly Morrisseau in December 2006 — a 27-year-old indigenous mother of three living in Vanier whose body was found dumped in a Gatineau parking lot — and the recent suicide in an Ottawa group home of a 13-year-old girl from Lac Seul First Nation near Dryden, Ont.

The leaders hope to use analytics — the sophisticated analysis of data and statistics — to find common factors that make some people more vulnerable. Are addictions present? Has a child visited a hospital emergency room? Is a student missing school? Has any other child been taken out of the home by social agencies?

Comparing those factors with previous cases can reveal strong correlations that indicate a child is at risk, said Greg Henderson, a security and fraud expert with the giant American analytics firm SAS. In the same way, data from past interventions can show what action is most likely to help. A pilot project in Florida, for example, shows that a visit to a home by a case worker can reduce the chance a child will die by 90 per cent, Henderson said.

In communities where social service resources are limited, knowing who to help first and what will work best can make all the difference, said Murray Rowe Jr., president of the Toronto data consulting firm Forrest Green.

“I don’t know of anything that could be implemented that could have a 90 per cent reduction in the murder rate,” Rowe said. “I’m not suggesting you can take a Florida team and bring it up here, but you can’t ignore these types of evidence-based and peer-reviewed programs.

“We can’t live with the status quo,” Rowe said. “We’re going to need to adopt technology so that existing people become more efficient. We can’t accept that over a thousand Indigenous women and girls have been murdered or gone missing. It’s totally intolerable.”

In an email to Postmedia, Ottawa police Deputy Chief Jill Skinner said the forum “opened my eyes to the power that technology can have in focusing our collaborative efforts to protect our vulnerable population.”

Skinner said she supported “collaborative solutions” in tackling the issue of violence against women (VAW) in aboriginal communities. “By addressing the VAW issues, these communities will be safer, healthier communities where aboriginal women will want to stay to live and thrive,” Skinner said.

But finding and using the data isn’t easy. Health on Reserves is a federal responsibility; the health information of indigenous people off reserve is a provincial matter. Collecting and sharing data from three levels of government poses serious privacy and security concerns.

The project brought in BlackBerry to ensure adequate security and SAS for its expertise in analytics.

The roadblocks to sharing data highlighted what Day called the “most important” aspect of the forum: that First Nations people own their own information.

“We need to control our own nations, our own identities, our own data,” Day said. ” … We need our own health and child welfare authorities — and we need to own and possess the data. We also need our own data when it comes to acquiring the necessary funding for housing, for economic development, for employment and training — the list goes on.”

But does reducing an individual to statistics, analytics and an algorithm take the human touch out of social work?

“There will always be a situation where the social worker can decide, ‘I’m going to go in on my gut feel,” Rowe said.

“But if the algorithm is correct, what if you spend time on non high-risk people and the odds go up for the kids that really need saving? It’s a pretty hard thing to ignore the data.”